Program Description

The department offers graduate programs leading to the Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science. The M.S. program is designed primarily to train students with professional goals in business, industry, or government. The program concentrates on applied computer science, emphasizing software development, programming, computer systems, and applications. One of the optional specializations is in cybersecurity. With either the thesis or the project option, each M.S. student is given the opportunity to work on a large-scale software or system development project involving analysis, design, evaluation, and implementation. Most M.S. students do not receive University financial support, although many find jobs and internships around the University and some students with special qualifications are appointed as TA’s and RA’s.

The Ph.D. program is for students interested in obtaining academic or research positions in universities or in government and commercial research laboratories. The program gives students a rigorous and thorough knowledge of a broad range of theoretical and practical research subject areas, and develops their ability to recognize and pursue significant research in computer science. Nearly all students in the Ph.D. program are supported as TAs in the first year, followed by a research assistantship on funded projects thereafter. In addition, the Department supplements the New York State teaching assistantship stipends.

The distinction between the M.S. and the Ph.D. programs is not necessarily hard and fast: Students enrolled in the M.S. program can (and often do) apply for admission to the Ph.D. program.

Research Areas

Visual Computing
The Center for Visual Computing is an internationally recognized center dedicated to research, industrial interaction, and education in the technology of and applications for digital images and computer-human interaction. Software tools developed by the Center include VolVis for volume visualization (disseminated to more than 3,500 sites), Virtual Colonoscopy for navigating in a reconstructed 3-D model of the colon for cancer screening, and BrainMiner for visual data exploration of the brain. The Center pioneered several architectures; the most recent has been the Cube-4 for real-time high-resolution volume rendering, which has been commercialized by Mitsubishi Electric as the VolumePro board—the first such hardware for the PC. Faculty in this group includes Ashikhmin, Brennan, Chiueh, Gu, Kaufman, Liang, Mitchell, Mueller, Pavlidis, Qin, Samaras, and Stent.

Computer Systems
The Computer Systems faculty work on many aspects of computer system problems: distributed systems, networks, and operating systems; communication networks and protocols; high-speed networks; multimedia and P2P networks; wireless and mobile networking; computer security; network security; fault-tolerance and security; storage and file systems; performance evaluation; modeling and analysis; processor and computer architecture; parallel I/O; superconducting computers and networks; massively parallel computation; compression; software systems and portability; software testing and verification; program analysis and optimization; compilers; and more. The Computer Systems faculty include Badr, Chiueh, Das, Gao, Gupta, Mohr, Sekar, Sion, Smith, Stoller, Wittie, Yang, and Zadok.

Applied Logic and Information Systems
This research group spans the areas of databases, logic programming, programming languages, Web information systems, and deductive systems. The group includes one of the largest and finest applied logic groups in the world, which attracts international visitors. XSB, developed by the group, is a widely-used deductive database/Prolog engine. FLORA-2, a deductive engine for the Semantic Web, is another popular project. Other important work includes tools for creating intelligent Web agents and automation of inference systems. Deductive calculi proposed by members of the group have been adopted in many state-of-the-art theorem-proving systems and were a key in the automated proof of the Robbins conjecture, a long-standing open mathematical problem. Faculty in this group are professors Bachmair, Gupta, Kelly, Kifer, Liu, C.R. Ramakrishnan, I.V. Ramakrishnan, Warren, Wasilewska, and Zhao.

Concurrency and Verification
The Concurrency and Verification group investigates methods for constructing reliable, robust, and secure concurrent and distributed systems. These methods are being used to verify the correctness of a number of safety-critical systems, communication protocols, and e-commerce protocols, as well as security properties of distributed systems. Primary industrial partners include ADEMCO, Computer Associates, Northrop Grumman, and Reuters International. Faculty in this group include Bernstein, Cleaveland, Grosu, Lewis, C.R. Ramakrishnan, I.V. Ramakrishnan, Smolka, Stark, Stoller, and Warren.

Algorithms and Complexity
This group does research in algorithms and data structures, computational biology, computational complexity, computational geometry, computational finances, complexity theory, string processing, and graph algorithms. In addition to our theoretical contributions, we have a strong record of developing widely-used systems for combinatorial computing, computer graphics optimization, and parallel-processor scheduling. This group includes Arkin, Bender, Gao, Ko, Mitchell, and Skiena.

Apart from research, furthering computer science education is another important part of the departmental agenda. Many faculty members have written books and developed educational software and Web-based material that is in use in hundreds of classrooms around the world. This group of distinguished faculty includes professors Bachmair, Bernstein, Kaufman, Kifer, Ko, Lewis, Pavlidis, Skiena, Smolka, Smith, and Warren.

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